International Journal of Chinese Education

Universities in the U. S. have adopted new curriculum to meet changes in the world. But how bold is the change, and how expanded is the reform vary by institutions. In this article, we look at the new curriculum for general education at the University of Maryland as a case study. We will first conduct a review of literature, which provides readers with an overview of the evolvement of general education and how it leads to the current types of reforms. We then present the reform at the University of Maryland, highlighting some key changes such as the addition of the I-Series courses, to illustrate the depth and breadth in reform in general education, and finally we reflect on the innovation and challenges of the reform.

Based on the author’s personal reflection from teaching a first year seminar on ecology, development and education in a US liberal arts college, this article explores the desirability as well as possibility to incorporate Eastern philosophies into Western liberal arts education. The article highlights two lessons that the author has generated from her teaching experience. Both lessons focus on the acquisition of skillsets that are at the core to both liberal arts education and education for sustainable development, and how the introduction of Eastern philosophies and their perspectives helps students accomplish or further strengthen these skills. Specifically, students develop more critical thinking skills by shifting the paradigm, and practice liberal arts education in real life by bringing knowledge and action together, connecting individual to community, and linking the global to the local.

Inspired by the understanding of curriculum as aesthetic text, study on the aesthetics of curriculum has attracted more and more interests in Taiwan. Based on the cultural lens of Taoism, this article aims to explore the theory and implementation of aesthetics of curriculum in a case study. The study found the aesthetics of Taoism in the curriculum can be understood from the aesthetics of relation, and the aesthetics of simplicity and plainness, which lead to the reconstruction of the way of “Being” in education.

The aesthetics of curriculum from a Taoist perspective sheds important light on educational reform. In the era of globalization, we should reconsider the implications of curriculum by looking back on and reviving our culture.

China’s higher education system has experienced a profound process of restructuring and transformation from elite to mass higher education in the past decades. College students are struggling with an increasingly disconnected learning experience which is caused by a more competitive learning environment. Under these new circumstances, what is the nature of student engagement in China’s colleges and universities? How do different forms of student engagement affect undergraduates’ success in college? This empirical study examined self-reported data of 18,607 students from 55 Chinese colleges in Beijing through structural equation modeling. The main findings are: student learning experience in college is integrated; different forms of student engagement have a complex mechanism of impacting on each other and consequently directly and indirectly contribute to student gains in college. Findings indicate that institutions in China and other Asian countries need to capture a comprehensive picture of how students change through assessing student overall college experience from a variety of perspectives.

This is an empirical study in the field of general education evaluation. Using data collected from three elite Chinese universities where general education is emphasized and promoted at institutional level, this study investigates the impacts of student background and extracurricular activities on student performance measured from the perspective of general education objectives, i.e., critical thinking, creativity, value judgment, decision-making, and communication skill. Female students perform significantly better in value judgment and decision-making, and students with higher socioeconomic status perform significantly better in decision-making and communication skill. Students with art talent perform significantly better in all the five skills. And high quality extracurricular activities are found to have positive effect on these skills, too.

In the last two decades or so, educating students with critical thinking, creativity and innovative skills has become a primary concern for many teachers, policy makers, university administrators, and even parents in China. This paper explores the development of cultivating students with critical thinking and its challenges. Current education reform in China indicates that policymakers and university administrators show serious concern, but under the pressure of exam-oriented education, memorization, and lecture pedagogy, faculty, university administrators and policy makers have not embraced it whole-heartedly. This research also found that general education is valued in Chinese higher education institutions, and will be more effective as politics, economy and society more developed in China.

Canada is often cited as an exception to academic capitalism, and features the egalitarianism in conducting and managing higher education. Over the years, Canadian universities served to provide comparable university education to a population that was sparsely distributed over an immense geographical area. The increasing scarceness of resources for higher education, fuelled by a largely neoliberal process of globalization, has been causing changes in Canadian higher education towards forming a differentiated university sector. Nevertheless, the traditions die hard. With a predominant social value deeply rooted in equity and social justice, Canadian higher education and universities continue to profile many aspects of the egalitarian legacy. Drawing on the notions of liberalism (pure liberalism, compensatory liberalism and neoliberalism) and academic capitalism, this paper analyzes the data displayed in Maclean’s University Rankings and CAUT’s (Canadian Association of University Teachers) Almanac of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, and illustrates the above points.